Wolf Hunter

Neither did she run.

Which made matters worse.

Her skin felt like velvet, an intoxication that streaked through him. The fact that he hadn’t been with a woman for a long time came home to haunt him. He hadn’t indulged since the damn gangbanger he’d been cuffing in a raid bit him, changing his life forever.

I’m in control. I can do this. Stay firm and see to her safety.

He chanted that silent internal directive several times before deciding that she had to do the moving. He couldn’t be trusted. Not completely. Not so close to a full moon.

How do I make you go? Scare you? Be the bully you had expected me to be? Maybe another touch will frighten you into doing the right thing.

Testing that theory, Cameron let his open hand linger on her cheek, almost able to hear time ticking away. Yet she didn’t take him up on the invitation of a hasty retreat.

He felt so damn beastly.

A roar of conquest rumbled in his chest as his heart changed rhythm to adapt to hers, lifting and falling in a series of vertical spikes. With utmost willpower, he fielded an oncoming rush of adrenaline.

The nameless woman’s legs were apart, with her feet planted. She had fisted her hands at her sides. Her teeth were clenched. But in her eyes lay another kind of unspoken invitation.

When his fingers slid slowly downward, she flinched as if she’d been stung, and blinked slowly. The level of her defiance in the face of rules governing two strangers meeting in dangerous places made his needs escalate. Cops were adrenaline junkies out of necessity, but this situation flowed out of the box. He was hot for her and wanting closeness. Any kind of closeness.

A growl erupted from his throat unchecked. Hell, he hadn’t meant to do that.

The woman beside him swayed in reaction to the sound. Her delicate face lost some of its color. Long lashes fluttered. Her chest rose and fell quickly with each new breath. But she stood there with her pulse racing hard enough to lift the skin beneath her right ear, movement that caused the two small diamond studs in her lobes to sparkle.

When she finally moved, it was in a way Cameron truly hadn’t expected. She stepped closer, pressing her chest to his, her hips to his. Suggestively.

Her eyes were on the top button of his shirt. She kept her gaze there while her body telegraphed quite clearly what she expected to happen.

Cameron swore. Restraining himself took real effort and came close to being the hardest thing he had ever attempted, after being a cop for five long years. More than anything, he wanted to throw her on the ground and prove just how dangerous he could be. His wolf liked the idea.

“You haven’t gone,” she said, speaking now through seductively moist parted lips.

“Neither have you.” The blood in his veins thrashed, racing toward the places already erect and ready for action.

“I’m thinking about going,” she said.

“Maybe you should think harder.”

She shook her head. “My advice to you is to take it or leave it before I change my mind.”

Another streak of heat tore through Cameron, magnified by surprise. What had she just said?

She had no qualms about this? About sex with a stranger who could have been anyone, and was, in actuality, so much more?

“I don’t know what game you’re playing, or what you’re up to,” he said, “but I just told you I never accost women in dark places, and I wasn’t lying.”

“Okay. Leave it, then.”

Cameron stared down at her, his stability tumbling. Finding this female had temporarily taken his mind off pressing problems. Imagining what he’d like to do to her was a luxury. But finding her alone in this park on a night like this—especially on a night like this—made all those sinful thoughts unacceptable.

Several gangs called this place their home turf. The whole area stank of wolf gone mad, and those mindless badasses, minus the fur, were out tonight and always up to no good. No werewolf could resist the play of moonlight so near to a full. He hadn’t been able to ignore it.

He could barely ignore this, or her.

Despite his eagerness, and after a monk-like few months, mating with this woman, on this spot, just wasn’t possible. He was what he was, and had been for a while. Wolf particles had been introduced to his bloodstream, creating and sealing a wolf to his system, leaving him unstable.

It had taken days of severe agony in order to recover from the initial nightmare of the bite that had made him a hybrid. In his mind, the image of the hyped-up bastard that had chomped on his arm remained fixed.

He might have lost his mind completely for a few of those terrible days afterward. Nothing of that existed now, other than the brief remembrance of uttering prayers about needing to be put out of his misery.

Yet he had survived. And closeness to others had become impossible, at home and at work. He stopped returning the stares from women on the street, and made no dates. He quit having drinks after-hours with the guys on his beat. All that withholding was paramount, and out of necessity, until he found out as much as he could about his present state, and about the control necessary to maintain it.

He existed now in werewolf infancy, with no way to anticipate what might happen if his emotions got involved. What if he hurt a woman by accident?

So you, he wanted to say to the female with the shining green eyes, are the ultimate temptation.

Until he knew everything, and maybe not even then, he wasn’t relationship material. And it was a given that a one-nighter with a pretty woman in a notoriously feral park wasn’t a win-win for anybody, under any circumstances. This close to a full moon, any thought to the contrary would be pure lunacy.

If you knew what resides at my core, Green Eyes, and what I have become, you would run off, screaming.

I hate what the moon does to people, she had said.

Those words still echoed in his mind.

Its beauty is deceitful, she’d said.

Looking at her now, he wanted to say, If you only knew what deceit actually is.

His wolf stirred, raising goose bumps on the back of Cameron’s neck. The wolf was searching for an early way out. This wolf, Cameron feared, might want to bite somebody back.

Oh yes, I want you, both man and wolf agreed when eyeing this woman, though in spite of the physical need pounding through him, he had told this woman he was a gentleman.

No joke.

Still, he had to admit that she possessed a streak of wildness unlike anything he’d encountered in a female, and this sparked his pleasure buttons. Part of him voted to take her up on her offer of closeness. Heck, most parts did. He was hard in all the right places and aching to act.

Didn’t everyone need company on a dark summer night?

Even a monster?

As the scent of female hormones floated in the moonlight, Cameron’s heart thundered. Her face was dewy, and enticingly damp. The slightest flush of pink had returned to her cheeks. Those large emerald eyes, slowly lifting to the level of his neck, his jaw, and continuing upward, were wide open. Her generous lips opened as if she’d say something else or take back what she’d said about him either taking her up on her offer, or leaving it.

He almost wished she would take all this back.

Cameron ran his hand over her black T-shirt, his heated palm sliding slowly from the rounded collar to the swell of her breasts. The shirt was thin. He felt her fullness as if there were nothing between his hand and her skin. And indeed, she was lacking undergarments that would have taken precious time to remove.

The raised buds of her nipples were an erotic discovery and a telling symptom of her heightened state of arousal. She was exotic, narcotic, and had become his drug of choice on a moon-filled night.